Surprise, surprise. I’ve joined an internet majority, and that is the haters of Snap Preview Anywhere. Sure, its an appealing concept: Roll over a link and see an image popup in a small bubble of the site that the link points to. But not only is it annoying, web browser slowing; it’s just plain instrusive. I mean, sure it may be handy to some people, but you’re about to click the link, can’t you wait the whole 2 seconds for the page to load and look at the website? SPA claims it saves ‘wasted clicks’ and you can ‘look before you leap’. Why not leap, look and if you dont like it, leap back? I mean, there is a thing called the back button, maybe Snap users should try it someday. Probably 100% of the time when you hover over a link, you have the intention of clicking it, so why do you need to see a preview of what the site looks like of you want to see it. The Snap preview isn’t saving you a wasted click, it’s wasting you time. And to add to the annoyances list; usually you have to click a link several times before it works because of the Snap previews delaying the rendering time by loading it’s stupid javascript popup.
SPA is annoying for a few simple reasons, but the main one is distraction. I’m browsing a blog, and I move my mouse or scroll using the scroll wheel and happen to stop on a link. Bam! Instantly your concentration is taking from the article to the shiny bubble that has popped up. Doesn’t anybody understand this is losing them readership or taking attention away from what really matters - the content? I’ve seen shopping sites using Snap.
And even highly acclaimed bloggers such as Matt Mullenweg, the founder of Wordpress endorses the nonsense javascript widget. The same with TechCrunch.com. To me, Snap provides no functionality, just headaches. Whatever happened to the title, over even id elements in the link tag?
Blogging is about providing your opinions and winning over readers. Snap isn’t going to win you readers, if anything, it’s going to push them away, including myself because as you can tell, I’m writing this post because SPA pisses me off. I want to go to a blog and be able to read the content and click the links without being interrupted by a so-called ‘cool’, shiny gadget. Of course it’s a great example of how to gain attention of your links, but a very annoying one. Maybe someone should put the concept to better use and into a better form then an annoying javascript popup.
So if you’re like me and hate this damn thing, there are a few ways you can disable it:
In my opinion, a popup is a popup and any amount of cosmetics, Web2.0ness or site previews will change the fact that popups are blatantly annoying.
And just a small note to anyone using Snap previews, I won’t read your blog because of the reasons outlined in this post.
Please direct all complaints, abuse, ignorance or stupidity to my inbox or leave a comment below.
Technorati Tags: snap, preview, widgets, javascript, web annoyances
(apparently a href is not allowed so I try again with the URL in plain text. please feel free to delete the previous comment)
My name is Erik Wingren and I head up User Research for Snap.com — the company behind the Snap Preview Anywhere (SPA) web service.
When you are ready to venture beyond the comfort of your own blog roll I highly recommend reading “The Snap Preview Anywhere Use Case” where I reiterate Snap’s design objectives in developing SPA, acknowledge and respond to the key points in the criticism and outline recent usability enhancements, aimed at solving the issues raised and then some…
The Snap Preview Anywhere Use Case: http://blog.snap.com/2007/02/09/spa-use-case/
That of course only if you are interested in an alternative perspective that may help explain what motivates the “internet minority” (that would be the 700K bloggers and site owners that has signed up for this free service to date and the steadily increasing number of new bloggers and site owners that sign up every day).
Snap can be useful in someways, however when advertising another website or whatever, it is quite annoying - For example, Snap could be used for alerts of some type where the user willingly scrolls over the link for it, however when Snap is used in the way you’ve stated, it can be quite annoying and it does piss quite a lot of people off - myself especially. The point that most explains the uselessness of Snap in this article is; “If you’re hovering over a link, you’ve already planned on going to it”, so why bother putting it on web pages?
- Jay
Snap Preview is just wrong …
So wrong that i blogged about it …
World without Snap Preview …
is a better world …
http://www.subcorpus.net/blog/
I hate snap as well.
To me Snap is the new pop up.
On Opera, go to Tools > Advanced > Blocked content, and add http://spa.snap.com/snap_preview_anywhere.js
Great site. Get your self some banners from cj to make extra $:)
I found one useful way to use Snap Preview - for Amazon product links. In the pop-up window you see the details of the product and text is readable. I left Snap Preview for my links exchange page so that visitors can get some impression of the websites listed. Otherwise I agree that it is not a good idea to use it anywhere - just for information that can be readable in the pop-up window.